A demand is usually seen as artificial when it increases consumer utility very inefficiently; for example, a physician prescribing unnecessary surgeries would create artificial demand.[3]Government spending with the primary purpose of providing jobs (rather than deliverying any other end product) has been labelled "artificial demand".[4] Similarly Noam Chomsky has suggested that unchecked militarism is a type of government-created artificial demand, a "system of state planning ... oriented toward military production, in effect, the production of high technology waste",[5] with military Keynesianism or a powerful military industrial complex amounts to the "creation of state-guaranteed markets for high technology waste (armaments)."[6][7][8][9][10]

Another example of artificial demand can be seen in penny stockspam. After purchasing a large number of shares of an extremely low-value stock, the spammer attempts to create artificial demand by implementing a spam-based guerrilla marketing strategy.